Tuesday, January 27, 2009

New Book

It's essentially about how the traditional threats to social order -- crime, terrorism (which is a kind of crime) and warfare -- can morph and fuse when they move online.

The book analyzes the attribution and response problems this creates, but from a primarily legal perspective. That is, it focuses on how and why the morphing of the threats challenges the ability of nation-states to identify and respond to them efficiently (and accurately). A lot of us probably already know all about that.

The book also includes my effort (product of work on some prior law review articles and other things, plus a fair amount of original thinking) to figure out why the challenges exist. The short answer to that one is that our response structures categorically divide threats into internal and external, the dividing line being a physical, territorial border. Physical borders essentially become irrelevant when conduct moves into cyberspace.

It also includes my effort an figuring out what we can do to improve the ability of nation-states (or supranational organizations, or evolved corporate governance structures or whatever the dominant governance structure remains/becomes) to deal with them. My goal really is to contribute to the process of thinking about all this, making some things problematic that we take for granted.

The book is called Cyberthreats: The Emerging Fault Lines of the Nation-State, and it's published by Oxford University Press.

If you'd like to check it out, you can find it on Amazon (and other online book sites).